To me you’re a wave, but to myself I’m sometimes a particle

Tags:

In quantum mechanics — i.e. in the real world as we understand it today — matter can have two kinds of formerly apparently contradictory qualities.

The same applies to people.

Matter propagates as a wave but materializes (for observers) as a particle.

Similarly, people can be both free and yet enslaved, depending not only on circumstance but on the observer too.

Example:

When I do something GOOD, I like to say I acted freely, and I experience it that way.
When I do something hurtful or BAD, I sometimes excuse myself by saying I couldn’t help it (meaning I experience the cause as compulsion, provocation, reaction, environment, upbringing, parents, circumstances …)

But, when you do something GOOD OR BAD, I tend to praise OR respectively blame you as though you acted freely, in either case.

People can be simultaneously responsible for their actions, and yet not exercising free will. Or vice versa.

Ah yes! The question of freedom. Many acts are not free – the baby crying for milk, the dog sniffing the vistors. If an act is to be free the person acting needs to be able to identify each and every motive affecting his actions and questions from an objective stance whether it is indeed best for him. It is no easy task and in many instances the excuse is partially correct – the drunk who hits his wife cannot control it at that point in time and can’t help it. Over a long period of time such a drunk could work and cure his drunkeness (despite his natural tendancy for it). In the realm of human action is indeed possible to be both free and unfree. The quantum concept that defies normal understanding I am unable to really have an opionion on and the Schrodinger’s Cat objection leads me to believe that one day we will completely revise this so called Quantum Theory.

This post really made me think of a certain Feynman phrase:
“We calculate as if light is a wave, but we interpret the intensity of the wave not as the intensity of the light but as the probability of finding a photon”

Author Profile

Emanuel Derman is Head of Risk at Prisma Capital Partners and a professor at Columbia University, where he directs their program in financial engineering. He is the author of My Life As A Quant, one of Business Week's top ten books of the year, in which he introduced the quant world to a wide audience. His latest book, due in October from Free Press, is Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disasters,On Wall Street and in Life.